The Deluge
Olivia de Havilland said ""Let's sue Warner Bros, shall we?"
The movie studio had just added several months to her expiring seven-year contract and the future grand dame was, to say the least, a tad angry.
Her attorney's position declared that California Labor Code proscribed that the employer--in this case, the studio--could not enforce a labor contract beyond seven years of the initial performance. California Superior Court agreed. Warner Bros appealed. The Court of Appeals smirked. The De Havilland Law stands today. It also symbolizes the first knot in the noose of the long-running and infinitely profitable studio system, where five corporations controlled the majority of production and distribution of the American film industry. In addition to the brothers Harry, Albert and Jack Warner, the other dominating forces in the business were Metro Goldwyn Mayer, Paramount Picture Corp, Fox Film Corporation/20th Century Fox, and RKO Radio Pictures Incorporated.
The so-called studio system worked well for the majors. These five companies (and to a lesser extent, the Little Three: Universal, United Artists and Columbia) ruled the industry through enforcement of vertical integration; in this case, the studios either owned the theaters outright or required them to show the movies of the majors or else risk having major motion pictures withdrawn from specific theatrical display and shown elsewhere, like at the cinema across the street.
This oligarchic arrangement put the decision-making devices squarely in the hands of a few industry executives, an arrangement often disparaged, yet one not lacking a positive side. The studio system gave the world some amazing film work, in no small part because those executives had little interest in handling the technical aspects of the daily operations (acting, writing, directing, editing, etc.) and "supervised" the creation of the forty to sixty movies each studio released annually throughout the 1930s and 1940s.
The second knot in the noose came in 1948 when all this vertical integration fell under the withering gaze of the United States Supreme Court via allegations of Anti-Trust violations. After all, the majors owned the actors, writers, producers and directors as well as the film processing plants, the prints and the means of distribution. The Court's ruling called for the studios to divest themselves of the movie theaters in their possession.
At the time of this court ruling, less than one percent of American homes had television sets. But by 1954, more than half the families in the United States owned a TV, and by the first years of the 1960s, more than ninety percent were sucking at the "glass teat." By this time, the gentrification of white people flocking to the suburbs had peaked, which left the market for movies to the working class and minorities, not an audience the majors licked their chops to cater. Technological innovations such as Technicolor and CinemaScope were used to lure the middle class into downtown venues, as were colossal Biblical productions. Perhaps the most effective change has been the introduction of the Motion Picture Association of America's rating system. The Motion Picture Production (or Hays) Code, claimed MPAA President Jack Valenti, stood for censorship. Better, he declared, to have a voluntary rating system to advise parents about degrees of adult content in the movies available for consumption. The real reason for the rating system was not to protect minors from exposure to violence, naughty language, drug abuse, nudity and sex, but rather to offer these things at the cinema because people could not expect to get them on their home television sets.
In other words, charges of artist stifling are nonsense.
The rise of independent movie-makers came about because of these ratings. Biker flicks, Kung Fu and sexploitation movies, slasher cinema, and blaxploitation theater gained low-brow enthusiasm among the sons and daughters of John and Mary MiddleClass, as well as among those previously disenfranchised inner city malformed consumer units i.e, teenagers and budding film aficionados. The popularization of violence, race antagonism, profanity, sexuality and nudity inevitably gave rise to the blockbuster, the first of which in modern times being The Godfather.
Blockbusters today tend toward various formulaic components, including but not limited to: Super Heroes,the inclusion of either Jennifer Lawrence or Tom Hanks, anything with either Star Wars or Harry Potter in the title, high tech animation, intrusive soundtracks, heavily microphoned explosions, and a nod towards innovative friendship conflict. As of this writing all of the top 100 films in terms of gross revenues include multiple uses of these components.
With the introduction in 1976 of the first basic cable television station in the U.S. (Ted Turner's Atlanta-based Super Station--Channel 17), followed shortly by Pat Robertson's Christian-oriented CBN, Any regulations the basic cable networks introduced were voluntary meaning that the early stations simply catered to the expectations of their advertisers. These commercial stations bowed to the economic reach of audiences that hated commercials and loved sex and violence. HBO and Showtime replayed recent theatrical releases (most of them of poor artistic quality, yet seemingly appropriate for people whose primary criteria for excellence was cheerleaders rising from the ruins of exploding tanks). By the dawn of the twenty-first century, many pay for view stations were licensing their own programs. It was a short hop for streaming companies such as Amazon Fire, Netflix and Hulu to go into the movie business, the benefits to these conglomerates being zero regulation and an exponentially growing audience base without pre-existing knowledge of what might at one time have been considered art.
The movie studio had just added several months to her expiring seven-year contract and the future grand dame was, to say the least, a tad angry.
Her attorney's position declared that California Labor Code proscribed that the employer--in this case, the studio--could not enforce a labor contract beyond seven years of the initial performance. California Superior Court agreed. Warner Bros appealed. The Court of Appeals smirked. The De Havilland Law stands today. It also symbolizes the first knot in the noose of the long-running and infinitely profitable studio system, where five corporations controlled the majority of production and distribution of the American film industry. In addition to the brothers Harry, Albert and Jack Warner, the other dominating forces in the business were Metro Goldwyn Mayer, Paramount Picture Corp, Fox Film Corporation/20th Century Fox, and RKO Radio Pictures Incorporated.
The so-called studio system worked well for the majors. These five companies (and to a lesser extent, the Little Three: Universal, United Artists and Columbia) ruled the industry through enforcement of vertical integration; in this case, the studios either owned the theaters outright or required them to show the movies of the majors or else risk having major motion pictures withdrawn from specific theatrical display and shown elsewhere, like at the cinema across the street.
This oligarchic arrangement put the decision-making devices squarely in the hands of a few industry executives, an arrangement often disparaged, yet one not lacking a positive side. The studio system gave the world some amazing film work, in no small part because those executives had little interest in handling the technical aspects of the daily operations (acting, writing, directing, editing, etc.) and "supervised" the creation of the forty to sixty movies each studio released annually throughout the 1930s and 1940s.
The second knot in the noose came in 1948 when all this vertical integration fell under the withering gaze of the United States Supreme Court via allegations of Anti-Trust violations. After all, the majors owned the actors, writers, producers and directors as well as the film processing plants, the prints and the means of distribution. The Court's ruling called for the studios to divest themselves of the movie theaters in their possession.
At the time of this court ruling, less than one percent of American homes had television sets. But by 1954, more than half the families in the United States owned a TV, and by the first years of the 1960s, more than ninety percent were sucking at the "glass teat." By this time, the gentrification of white people flocking to the suburbs had peaked, which left the market for movies to the working class and minorities, not an audience the majors licked their chops to cater. Technological innovations such as Technicolor and CinemaScope were used to lure the middle class into downtown venues, as were colossal Biblical productions. Perhaps the most effective change has been the introduction of the Motion Picture Association of America's rating system. The Motion Picture Production (or Hays) Code, claimed MPAA President Jack Valenti, stood for censorship. Better, he declared, to have a voluntary rating system to advise parents about degrees of adult content in the movies available for consumption. The real reason for the rating system was not to protect minors from exposure to violence, naughty language, drug abuse, nudity and sex, but rather to offer these things at the cinema because people could not expect to get them on their home television sets.
In other words, charges of artist stifling are nonsense.
The rise of independent movie-makers came about because of these ratings. Biker flicks, Kung Fu and sexploitation movies, slasher cinema, and blaxploitation theater gained low-brow enthusiasm among the sons and daughters of John and Mary MiddleClass, as well as among those previously disenfranchised inner city malformed consumer units i.e, teenagers and budding film aficionados. The popularization of violence, race antagonism, profanity, sexuality and nudity inevitably gave rise to the blockbuster, the first of which in modern times being The Godfather.
Blockbusters today tend toward various formulaic components, including but not limited to: Super Heroes,the inclusion of either Jennifer Lawrence or Tom Hanks, anything with either Star Wars or Harry Potter in the title, high tech animation, intrusive soundtracks, heavily microphoned explosions, and a nod towards innovative friendship conflict. As of this writing all of the top 100 films in terms of gross revenues include multiple uses of these components.
With the introduction in 1976 of the first basic cable television station in the U.S. (Ted Turner's Atlanta-based Super Station--Channel 17), followed shortly by Pat Robertson's Christian-oriented CBN, Any regulations the basic cable networks introduced were voluntary meaning that the early stations simply catered to the expectations of their advertisers. These commercial stations bowed to the economic reach of audiences that hated commercials and loved sex and violence. HBO and Showtime replayed recent theatrical releases (most of them of poor artistic quality, yet seemingly appropriate for people whose primary criteria for excellence was cheerleaders rising from the ruins of exploding tanks). By the dawn of the twenty-first century, many pay for view stations were licensing their own programs. It was a short hop for streaming companies such as Amazon Fire, Netflix and Hulu to go into the movie business, the benefits to these conglomerates being zero regulation and an exponentially growing audience base without pre-existing knowledge of what might at one time have been considered art.
